


Liminal

by Gingahninjah



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Episode: s05e18 The Jedi Who Knew Too Much, Episode: s05e19 To Catch A Jedi, Episode: s05e20 The Wrong Jedi, Leaving the order, Post-Episode: s05e20 The Wrong Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21515899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gingahninjah/pseuds/Gingahninjah
Summary: Oneshot. Ahsoka reflects on her decision to leave the Order, and what that means for her life. A thinly veiled piece of trauma processing from my own experience leaving a high demand religion lmao. 50pts if you can guess which one.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	Liminal

**Author's Note:**

> Repost from FF. Original posting 08/10/19

For the fourth time this week, Ahsoka found herself at the spaceport at 3am.

It wasn't just that she couldn't sleep. There was something about the feeling of a port she craved. It wasn't necessarily a good feeling, but it was a bad one either. Reality felt slightly altered, almost like a dream.

There were a few other places that made her feel like nothing was real. Abandoned buildings, dark stairwells, empty alleyways-liminal spaces. Places that feel sort of fuzzy...as if their existence isn't quite concrete and if you look away they'll fade out. As if you'll fade out too. But there was something about an empty spaceport that really got to her.

You're not supposed to stay in a spaceport. It's an in between place. If you pick the right port, there are almost endless possible destinations waiting for you. It's something of a portal between worlds.

Ahsoka's whole life felt liminal at the moment. Maybe that's why she kept coming here. She wanted to leave Corusaunt, but she wasn't sure where to go. She'd visited dozens of other systems-even fought to keep them free-but the temple was the only home she'd ever known.

The loss of her faith in the Jedi Order brought with it a surprising amount of her sense of self. For years she'd quietly taken any doubt or problem she had and pushed it aside, like boxing it up and putting it on a shelf. When the shelf came crashing down it shook the whole house and shattered everything in sight. Everything she knew, everything she'd done in her life, was defined by the order. Without it, who was she? What did she believe? Hell, she didn't even know what she liked to do. Life as a jedi didn't exactly leave you with time for hobbies.

She'd started making a list of the things the order had taught her that she didn't believe. After the pain of her trial had started to dull, she thought about all the other things that made her mad.

No individualism.

When she was in the order, her actions, thoughts and emotions were not her own. Everything had to be approved of by the counsel.

Anger. They'd told her never to feel anger.

Anger, fear...they'd told her to have negative emotions was to be selfish, and would lead you down a dark path. Now it seemed the only emotion she had left was anger. It was always there in the background, threatening to boil over. And to fear is to be alive. It doesn't have to paralyze you, but there is no shame in feeling it.

She'd been made to feel shame about so many parts of herself-from her spunk to the way she dressed. Feelings of attraction. Questioning authority.

Your own will didn't matter. Only the will of the force. But that will was only to be interpreted by the council. Her own morals, her own feelings didn't matter. She was to surrender herself entirely to the force.

Fark that.

She wanted to live for herself for once. Of course, that didn't mean she didn't want to help people. Quite the opposite. How many times had she been forced to leave people in their suffering, or even allow them to die, because "it is the will of the force". How often had she been told "the will of the force" was that she be more "balanced". Why did the force care so much about what she did or wore or said, but didn't care about the millions of life forms who were enslaved throughout the galaxy. Why was the will of the force to keep the republic together, against the will of the inhabitants of many systems, and not to mobilize against the true evils of the universe.

Was it possible that the order was wrong about the Force? Did they really know what its will was? Did anyone?

Lately she'd started to question if there even was a "Force". That she had abilities she couldn't doubt of course. She knew well the "lower-case f force". She could feel it all around her. There was tangible evidence of it. But was there really this sentient Force behind everything that happened in the universe?

She'd heard it said once of humans, "and man created God in his own image", and she couldn't help but feel this way about the Force. It didn't care about bureaucracy, especially with the current state of the republic. It didn't give a damn about her or anyone else.

And there was the problem. If it was out there, it didn't really make a difference. It wasn't going to interfere. The universe would continue on the way it was.

It scared her to think that there wasn't a Force telling her what to do. It was terrifying, really. She felt lost and directionless. She'd have to make her own choices, and she wasn't sure where to start.

But then she realized. If the Force wasn't directing her life, it hadn't been all along. She'd always been making her own decision. She'd always been guiding herself, she just didn't know it.

So maybe everything would be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposting bc this is one of my favorite things I've written, not necessarily because it's the best but because it was stupidly personal. Growing up, I saw myself in Ahsoka as strongly as I did in part because I related to her constant struggle within the Order, seeing the problems but sticking it out and toeing the line between her personal values and the values assigned to her. It was really easy and useful to project my own feelings onto her, and as her arc wrapped up with her walking away, when I decided to leave it was obviously all too perfect. I wrote this about a week after transferring out of my religious private university, moving out of my church owned housing, and walking away from all of my friends-many of whom I knew would never speak to me again.
> 
> A reviewer in FF pointed out that the order is composed of fundamentalist extremists or a sort and the proto jedi were very different. I didn't explicitly address that but yes, that is definitely true and is also analogous with more general forms of christianity as compared to my upbringing lmao.


End file.
